Wednesday, January 30, 2013

New paper finds potential glacier contribution to sea levels is 43% less than IPCC claims

A paper published today in The Cryosphere finds that the ice volume of global glaciers is 43% less than estimated by the IPCC. According to the author, "the total volume of all glaciers in the world is 0.35 ± 0.07 meter sea level equivalent," as compared to the IPCC estimate of 0.5 meter sea level equivalent. This new paper, along with other recent papers demonstrating that Greenland is resistant to warming, and that ice mass gain in Antarctica is reducing sea levels, collectively demonstrate that IPCC projections of sea level rise are greatly exaggerated.

A. Grinsted1College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China2Centre for Ice and Climate, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, DenmarkAbstract. I asses the feasibility of multi-variate scaling relationships to estimate glacier volume from glacier inventory data. I calibrate scaling laws against volume observations of optimized towards the purpose of estimating the total global ice volume. This is applied individually to each record in the Randolph Glacier Inventory which is the first globally complete inventory of glaciers and ice caps. I estimate that the total volume of all glaciers in the world is 0.35 ± 0.07 m sea level equivalent. This is substantially less than a recent state-of-the-art estimate. Area volume scaling bias issues for large ice masses, and incomplete inventory data are offered as explanations for the difference.